The assignee of the present invention designs and manufactures spacecraft for, inter alia, communications and broadcast services from geosynchronous orbit. Payloads of such spacecraft operating at microwave and millimeter-wave frequencies may include arrangements that combine multiple solid state devices to achieve high levels of power. Within such arrangements, conventional power-splitting or power-combining structures require external passive circuitry to match an impedance of an input (or output) port to an impedance of a corresponding output (or input) terminal of a traditional amplifier or other RF component. By way of example, an output port of a conventional power-splitter may be coupled with a monolithic microwave integrated circuit (MMIC), which contains impedance matching circuitry.
In the absence of the present teachings, conventional power-splitting or power-combining structures suffer insertion and mismatch loss introduced by use of the impedance matching circuitry described in the preceding paragraph, resulting in undesirable efficiency loss.
An improved power-splitting or power-combining structure suffering reduced insertion and mismatch loss is desirable.